Publications related to Designing Nudges for Self-directed Learning in a Data-rich Environment

Generative AI-Enabled Conversational Interaction to Support Self-Directed Learning Experiences in Transversal Computational Thinking

Denis Gillet, Adrian Christian Holzer, Abdessalam Ouaazki, Juan Carlos Farah

As computational thinking (CT) becomes increasingly acknowledged as an important skill in education, self-directed learning (SDL) emerges as a key strategy for developing this capability. The advent of generative AI (GenAI) conversational agents has disrup ...

2024

Seeking the new, learning from the unexpected: Computational models of surprise and novelty in the brain

Alireza Modirshanechi

Human babies have a natural desire to interact with new toys and objects, through which they learn how the world around them works, e.g., that glass shatters when dropped, but a rubber ball does not. When their predictions are proven incorrect, such as whe ...

EPFL2024

GELEX: Generative AI-Hybrid System for Example-Based Learning

Tanja Christina Käser Jacober, Paola Mejia Domenzain, Aybars Yazici, Jibril Albachir Frej

Traditional example-based learning methods are often limited by static, expert-created content. Hence, they face challenges in scalability, engagement, and effectiveness, as some learners might struggle to relate to the examples or find them relevant. To a ...

Association for Computing Machinery2024

Topics in statistical physics of high-dimensional machine learning

Hugo Chao Cui

In the past few years, Machine Learning (ML) techniques have ushered in a paradigm shift, allowing the harnessing of ever more abundant sources of data to automate complex tasks. The technical workhorse behind these important breakthroughs arguably lies in ...

EPFL2024

Robust machine learning for neuroscientific inference

Steffen Schneider

Modern neuroscience research is generating increasingly large datasets, from recording thousands of neurons over long timescales to behavioral recordings of animals spanning weeks, months, or even years. Despite a great variety in recording setups and expe ...

EPFL2024

Revisiting adversarial training for the worst-performing class

Volkan Cevher, Thomas Michaelsen Pethick, Grigorios Chrysos

Despite progress in adversarial training (AT), there is a substantial gap between the topperforming and worst-performing classes in many datasets. For example, on CIFAR10, the accuracies for the best and worst classes are 74% and 23%, respectively. We argu ...

2023

Simulated Learners in Educational Technology: A Systematic Literature Review and a Turing-like Test

Tanja Christina Käser Jacober

Simulation is a powerful approach that plays a significant role in science and technology. Computational models that simulate learner interactions and data hold great promise for educational technology as well. Amongst others, simulated learners can be use ...

SPRINGER2023

Finding Paths for Explainable MOOC Recommendation: A Learner Perspective

Tanja Christina Käser Jacober, Jibril Albachir Frej, Tatjana Nazaretsky

The increasing availability of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has created a necessity for personalized course recommendation systems. These systems often combine neural networks with Knowledge Graphs (KGs) to achieve richer representations of learners ...

2023

Transfer learning application of self-supervised learning in ARPES

Gabriel Aeppli

There is a growing recognition that electronic band structure is a local property of materials and devices, and there is steep growth in capabilities to collect the relevant data. New photon sources, from small-laboratory-based lasers to free electron lase ...

IOP Publishing Ltd2023

XTab: Cross-table Pretraining for Tabular Transformers

Mahsa Shoaran, Bingzhao Zhu

The success of self-supervised learning in computer vision and natural language processing has motivated pretraining methods on tabular data. However, most existing tabular self-supervised learning models fail to leverage information across multiple data t ...

JMLR.org2023

Evaluation of teachers’ orchestration tools usage in robotic classrooms

Pierre Dillenbourg, Sina Shahmoradi, Barbara Bruno, Aditi Kothiyal

Teachers’ self-efficacy in managing classrooms is an important consideration when it comes to bringing educational robots to classrooms. Orchestration tools support teachers by providing awareness indicators of students’ progress as well as levers to contr ...

2023

Learning From Heterogeneous Data Based on Social Interactions Over Graphs

Ali H. Sayed, Stefan Vlaski, Virginia Bordignon

This work proposes a decentralized architecture, where individual agents aim at solving a classification problem while observing streaming features of different dimensions and arising from possibly different distributions. In the context of social learning ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2023

Understanding Revision Behavior in Adaptive Writing Support Systems for Education

Tanja Christina Käser Jacober, Paola Mejia Domenzain, Luca Mouchel, Thiemo Wambsganss

Revision behavior in adaptive writing support systems is an important and relatively new area of research that can improve the design and effectiveness of these tools, and promote students' self-regulated learning (SRL). Understanding how these tools are u ...

Zenodo2023

Beyond Spectral Gap: The Role of the Topology in Decentralized Learning

Thijs Vogels, Hadrien Hendrikx, Martin Jaggi

In data-parallel optimization of machine learning models, workers collaborate to improve their estimates of the model: more accurate gradients allow them to use larger learning rates and optimize faster. In the decentralized setting, in which workers commu ...

Microtome Publishing2023

Learning Robust and Adaptive Representations: from Interactions, for Interactions

Yuejiang Liu

Interactions are ubiquitous in our world, spanning from social interactions between human individuals to physical interactions between robots and objects to mechanistic interactions among different components of an intelligent system. Despite their prevale ...

EPFL2023

Impersonating Chatbots in a Code Review Exercise to Teach Software Engineering Best Practices

Denis Gillet, Sandy Ingram, Maria Jesus Rodriguez Triana, Juan Carlos Farah, Vandit Sharma

Over the past decade, the use of chatbots for educational purposes has gained considerable traction. A similar trend has been observed in social coding platforms, where automated agents support software developers with tasks such as performing code reviews ...

IEEE2022

Self-Exciting Point Processes: Identification and Control

Michael Mark

This thesis addresses theoretical and practical aspects of identification and subsequent control of self-exciting point processes. The main contributions correspond to four separate scientific papers. In the first paper, we address the challenge of robust ...

EPFL2022

Personalized Productive Engagement Recognition in Robot-Mediated Collaborative Learning

Jauwairia Nasir, Barbara Bruno

In this paper, we propose and compare personalized models for Productive Engagement (PE) recognition. PE is defined as the level of engagement that maximizes learning. Previously, in the context of robot-mediated collaborative learning, a framework of prod ...

2022

A Blueprint for Integrating Task-Oriented Conversational Agents in Education

Denis Gillet, Sandy Ingram, Juan Carlos Farah

Over the past few years, there has been an increase in the use of chatbots for educational purposes. Nevertheless, the chatbot technologies and architectures that are often applied to educational contexts are not necessarily designed for such contexts. Whi ...

2022

Evolutionary Clustering of Apprentices' Self- Regulated Learning Behavior in Learning Journals

Christian Giang, Tanja Christina Käser Jacober, Paola Mejia Domenzain, Mirko Marras

Learning journals are increasingly used in vocational education to foster self-regulated learning and reflective learning practices. However, for many apprentices, documenting working experiences is a difficult task. In this paper, we profile apprentices' ...

2022